Create an Animated Homage to Bruce Lee – Day 1

In this tutorial Markus walks us through the creation of a video accompaniment to Bruce Lee's 'Be Water' philosophy. It features vibrant motion typographic sub-titles, animated illustrations and clever camera techniques. The training will be split over 3 days for a total of 71 minutes of tutorial video.

In day 1 of the training Markus designs and animates the typography for the video. This tutorial is an excellent compliment to Markus's 'Create Rhythmic Motion Typography' tutorial and demonstrates some more advanced typographic techniques.

Tutorial

This is Markus Gustafsson from aetuts.com and today I'm going to give you a complete walk through on how I make this Be Water movie.

"Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend."

So, this tutorial is going to be divided into three parts. The first part which is this part is going to be syncing the sound. Designing and animating. The second part is going to be making the water and the transition between the cup and the bottle. And the third part is going to be building the scene, adding the camera and [inaudible 00:54] the camera.

So let's begin. So open up a new composition. Name it "Be Water". You can use the same settings as I used in the Be Water movie. Import the sound, "Be Water". Track the sound to the time line, press "LL". Turn up the volume.

Here I see in the beginning there is no sound there so drag the layer to the left. I'm going to play up the last three seconds in the sound. [Plays audio]. So there is some sound we don't need there so I am going to cut that sound out. I'll do that by "Trim comp to work area". We'll now start syncing the text to the sound.

[Plays audio] We're going to type out "Empty your mind and be formless".
So "Empty your mind" that is our outer layer. Hold in control while you scroll to the audio. [Plays audio] So that's the beginning. Crop the layers. [Plays audio]

That looks good. We are going to pre-compose this. Go into layer, pre-
compose. Name it "Empty your mind". Press okay. Crop down the composition. Now start typing out the "be formless".

[Plays audio] Let's pre-compose this as well. Be formless. What I am going to do now is pause this recording and do the syncing for you so we can continue with the design. So the syncing is done. This is what we got, "Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend. Empty your mind."

All right. So let's continue with the designing. Go into our "Empty your mind" composition. I'm going to choose a co-font. The original font I used seems to be gone from my computer so we are going to use another font.

We are going to reposition this. I'm going to choose the position, copy and paste. I'm going to move it down. Copy and paste the position as well. That looks pretty good.

Let's add a background. Make a solid, BG, comp size, make it black. Put it beneath all the layers. We are going to use an effect called ramp. Go into generate and ramp. You can see it but it's there, ramp. We are going to choose radio ramp and move it to the center. Expand it.

We are going to choose a light brownish color. Pick the same color and choose a dark brown. We are going to import our mind illustration. Continue our illustration, import the mind, and choose composition and the layer size. Press okay.

Drag the mind to our time line. There. We need to scale it down. Move it to the left. Move it. Place the text next to the mind. So we go into main composition. We are going to add some drop shadow to it. Go into effects, perspective and drop shadow. Set the distance to 10 and softness, 25. Copy the effect to the mind.

Do the same thing for our text. Empty your mind. Turn off the background. Choose the same effect again. Distance to three and softness to five. ...
Looks good. Copy the effect to the other two text areas. That looks pretty good to me.

What I am going to do now is to pause this recording again. I'm going to do all the design for you so we can continue to the animation. So this is what we got, "Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend. Empty your mind."

Let's continue with the animation. We'll go into our empty your mind composition. And I'm going to animate the shape of the text. We are going to use the mask tool. We are going to set a key frame for the mask.

What I want to do now is to have the top value to the bottom value. Copy the bottom value and place it on the top. Press okay. Choose the position and move it upwards. Now it seems like it is coming out of the empty text.

We are going to use the same effect again for the mind. Press "M" for mask path. Set a key frame. Choose a shape, we want the right value to be the left value. Press "P" for position. Move it to the left. Motion here. That looks pretty good to me.

We are going to use the same masking technique on that, and as well as over here. I'm going to pause this recording and do the masking for you so we can continue with the other part of the animation. This is what I've done while I've paused all the recording. Turn all the compositions into 3D. Turn all the text into 3D and motion blur. And all the illustrations into 3D and motion blur.

Let's preview. "Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend."

Let's continue with the animation. What I want to do is have this shapeless fly in. Enter shapeless like water layout composition. Animate the position. I want to animate the Z position of the position. Move the shapeless layer, negative thousand pixels.

Let's preview. "Shapeless like". That looks good. I want to animate the transition between "you put water in a cup" and "it becomes a cup". What I am going to do is to add a null object. Move the null object down into the
"now you put water into a" composition. Turn it into 3D.

Move the null object down so it aligns up with the text. There, and parent the composition to the null. So if I rotate the null, I rotate the composition as well. Set the null object to 90 degrees. Parent the "it becomes the cup" to the null. ... We want to animate this and set it to 90.

The other composition comes up from the back of the other composition. Let's see here. I think we should move the key frames forward a bit. That is better. We are going to extend the other composition. We are going to animate its position, so it fades out when the other composition comes up. Animate the position of the transparency to zero so it fades.

Let's see how that looks. "It becomes the cup, you put." That looks pretty good to me. What I want to do now is animate the teapot word. And first of all we will go to our teapot composition there. Delete this text. Go to our main composition and choose the scale property. First of all, let's sync the teapot animation to the sound. We just need to scroll through the audio again to listen.

[Plays audio]. Here is the teapot again. Scale and move the point of interest up so it scales from the top. Set the scale to one hundred tenth. See how that looks. .... "it becomes the teapot". I think I am going to scale this up a bit further to 20. Let's preview. [Plays audio]. Much better. What I want to do now is to add the water stroke. Add a new layer and name this water stroke. Make comp size. Move it down to water can flow. Crop it down.

We'll turn it off. Select the text and add the show grid and add the snaps grid. turn off the background as well. Select the water stroke layer and select the pencil. We are going to draw the water stroke path with the pencil.

I'm holding down the shift so it snaps. That looks good. Add the stroke. Generate, stroke. Set it transparent. Let's turn off the show grid. Show grid there. Turn the background on again.

Let's move it down. 3D, scale it up, scale it up. Move the water above the strokes. It is going to copy its drop shadow to the strokes. That looks pretty good.

We want to animate the start value of the stroke. Set the key frame for the start. Press "U". "C Alt" key frames for the layer. Set the start value to one hundred. Looks good. Motion blur as well.

Let's make the floor. A new solid, floor. Move it down first then crop it out. Let's use the mask tool. Add the stroke again. On transparent. Smooth the floor mood down. Add the drop shadow, perspective, drop shadow. Set the direction to zero. Set the distance to five, it is all right. Softness to around 20. That looks pretty good.

Now we are going to add the water splash. Use this paint click and drag it into the time line. Line the animation up with the floor. Set the mode to screen and position it. Add the mask. Set the mask to subtract. Line this animation up with the text.
I want to take away the middle splashes of the splash so we are going to mask that out. Set to subtract. Let's see if it is all right with the syncing with the clip. Let's move the clip a bit backwards. That looks perfect. I just want to crop the movie clip down so it appears when the
"be water" comes.

Now I want to animate the "my friend" words. I'm going to delete the word friend. I'm going to type in there, the same word, the same layer. Go down to our text layer there and choose the animate property. Set capacity. Drag the capacity down to zero. Go out into range selector and set a key frame for the start. You want to align the animation up to the sound.

[Plays audio] There it ends. Set the start value to one hundred. Let's preview. [Plays audio] We are going to drag the key words a bit closer.
[Plays audio] Much better. That's the end of part one of this Be Water tutorial. Tune in to part two where we'll be making the water. See you soon.